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Thursday, May 17, 2018

Ukrainian mayor, diplomat caught engaging in antisemitic rhetoric

Amid international pressure on Ukraine over its perceived tolerance of antisemitism, a local mayor and a diplomat were documented engaging hate speech against Jews.

Eduard Dolinsky, director of the Ukrainian Jewish Committee, posted a video on Facebook Monday of Mayor Vlodimyr Moskal’s address to city councilmen in which he railed against Jews. Moskal is mayor of the village of Skole, located 60 miles southwest of Lviv.

Quoting Henry Ford’s antisemitic writing about Jewish schemes for world domination, Moskal said: “A lot of that work is devoted to the death of the goyim,” Hebrew for non-Jews. “Christians, Arabs, Buddhists, they are not people to them after their reaching world domination, which they are clearly trying to do through cosmopolitanism and liberalism in order to destroy all nations, to leave the political nation, to mix everyone into one lump, migrants, blacks,” the mayor said. He also called the government, whose prime minister, Volodymyr Groysman, is Jewish, “Muscovite Jews”– an insult in a country where anti-Russian sentiment is rife.

Separately, screenshots shared online show that Vasyl Marushchynets, who works at Ukraine’s consulate in Hamburg, Germany, blamed Jews for World War II and said “death to the anti-fascists” on his private Facebook page, Reuters reported Monday. Marushchynets and the Hamburg consulate did not immediately respond to requests for comment, but Ukraine’s foreign ministry confirmed his suspension.

“Antisemitism and those who stir up inter-ethnic discord can have no place either in civilized society or in the foreign ministry,” Ukrainian Foreign Minister Pavlo Klimkin said on Twitter.

Ukraine in recent weeks has seen a spate of antisemitic incidents, including vandalism at two monuments for Holocaust victims. One of the monuments was firebombed, and on another unidentified parties wrote neo-Nazi slogans.